


And Leaves the World to Darkness and to Me

by yet_intrepid



Series: miserable events [1]
Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - A Series of Unfortunate Events, Combeferre is always important when you're Enjolras!, Enjolras-centric, Gen, Kid Enjolras, Kid Fic, also Combeferre is not there but he's still important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23010250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: "I know what perished means," says Enjolras, lifting his chin at the lawyer come to meet him on the desolate wharf.*If you are looking for a happy story, I entreat you to look elsewhere. If, however, you are looking for a series of disjointed oneshots in which a set of young aspiring revolutionaries find themselves distressed, lonely, and thwarted at every turn? You have found what you are looking for, though I must say I cannot imagine why you seek it.*A Series of Unfortunate Events AU.
Series: miserable events [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653706
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	And Leaves the World to Darkness and to Me

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it's been 6 years since I posted fic in this fandom. No, I have nothing to say for myself about any of this.
> 
> Title is from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

“I know what perished means,” says Enjolras, lifting his chin at the lawyer come to meet him on the desolate wharf. The gray sky darkens over the gray waters of the Rhone, and Enjolras says nothing more.

And says nothing, and says nothing, and says nothing, until the last of the funeral bells has rung.

*

Every relative Enjolras has—every adult male relative he has, that is—walks into the big study at his grandmother’s looking far more solemn than they did at the funeral. Enjolras stands against the wall in the corridor and watches them, playing his failed arguments for being allowed to join the family council for his parents’ will over and over in his head. He can’t figure out what he could’ve done better, but there must’ve been _something_. It’s mostly him that the meeting is about, after all, and so many people are going. Representatives from banks are arriving, too, and so many lawyers that Enjolras is frankly dazed at where they could all have come from.

Or perhaps, he admits to himself, he’s dazed because he only slept two hours last night. Perhaps he’s dazed because he hasn’t been allowed to talk to the one living person he wants to be around: Combeferre. They’d barely even been able to make eye contact at the funeral.

Enjolras leans a little heavier against the wall. Combeferre would understand all this. Combeferre would be able to see where he messed up the case to join the adults while they determined his guardianship. Combeferre would have something distracting to share, from his smuggled Latin textbooks or from the botany diagrams he’s been teaching himself to do. Combeferre—

Someone pats Enjolras’ hair, and he looks up.

“It’s all such a pity, isn’t it?” His uncle is talking to him, presumably, but looking into the empty space over his head. “Your parents going off and dying like that.” 

“Uncle Louis-Pierre,” Enjolras starts, with a jolt of hope for renewing his argument, but his uncle just tuts.

“Inconsiderate,” he says, and moves on. “Some of us have business to attend to…”

“Damn,” Enjolras hisses. He hardly swears, less even than the other boys in his class. He knows what he thinks it’s worth getting in trouble over, after all, and strong language doesn’t generally make the list. But there is something uniquely unbearable about all this. Plus, he has nowhere else to put his feelings, which are exhaustingly large and—he can’t think of the word he wants, the word for how they flip around and argue with each other and refuse to stay put long enough for him to name them. 

Combeferre would know. And that’s the worst part of it, really. It’s why being shut out of the decision about his guardianship is so bad: if he has to leave Lyons, leave Combeferre, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

He doesn’t know what either of them will do.

The lawyer who found him on the pier, M. Tholomyès, emerges from the study to glance exaggeratedly up and down the hall for any missing participants. Enjolras takes a step forward, ready to try again.

And then, from the entryway, there’s a new voice, self-importantly loud, with an accent Enjolras can’t place.

“What do you mean you don’t know who I am?”

And then, over the porter’s answer, some kind of a chorus:

“He’s Count Olaf.”

“The not-at-all mysterious close friend of the deceased.”

“Not at all mysterious but definitely handsome.”

“And a talented actor.”

Enjolras, drawn by what feels like a horrible magnetism, moves towards the voices. Other people have started congregating too: his grandmother, for one, and the lawyer Tholomyès.

This Count Olaf, dressed not in mourning-appropriate black but in a startlingly purple and somewhat worn frock coat, is striding towards them, his arms outstretched. He has a cane in one hand, his hat in the other. Behind him are five people who are dressed, Enjolras thinks, like very small children might dress if you told them to pretend they were attending a king’s funeral.

He wishes he could attribute this to having slept only two hours last night and lost command of his senses, but he has never felt so miserable in a dream—only waking.

“Good day, Madame Enjolras,” Count Olaf is saying, “though I hesitate to say it on such a dark, foregoing chapter in all of our lives and especially in mine!” He clutches his chest—genteel, _staged_.

Enjolras hates him.

“You mean foreboding,” he says.

His grandmother glares at him. “Hush, Alexandre. Welcome, Monsieur le Comte, and thank you. I was unaware that my son and daughter-in-law walked in titled circles; it means a great deal that you have come—and from a long ways, I imagine—to pay your regards.”

“I wouldn’t dream of staying away,” says Count Olaf, his face all overdramatic sympathy, and then he glances at Enjolras a moment with the briefest and most villainous smile imaginable. “When I got the news I didn’t waste a moment. You know, Madame Enjolras, your son and I were so close that he once told me were he and his wife to somehow die an untimely death, his first choice would be to appoint me as his son’s guardian.”

Enjolras expects his grandmother to raise some objection then. She may be any number of things he disagrees with, certainly; she may be a royalist and complacent in her wealth and firm on traditions. But he has never thought her to be a _fool_.

Instead, she takes Count Olaf by the arm. “You are just in time,” she says. “Our family council over the will is about to begin.”

She escorts him into the room, along with his five followers; M. Tholomyès closes the doors.

And Enjolras stands there dumbstruck.

There have been moments before when he felt a great and terrible clarity about the future—about awful things, always, much as he wishes it were otherwise. He feels it now: a knowing without knowing, which he cannot explain.

Count Olaf—or whoever he really is—is going to become his guardian, and Enjolras will have to be ready.

*

Out the window of the entryway, the dark gray skies still darken. 


End file.
